Power Consumpution of the New Radeon HD 4770

Graphics cards have become exponentially more powerful over the past few years, and with that power comes rampant power consumption. Chip makers AMD and Nvidia have made strides to reduce power waste, but how efficient are their efforts? Let's take a look at the newly released Radeon HD 4770--The first 40nm desktop GPU from AMD.

ExtremeTech's Jason Cross took a long look at the HD 4770, which thanks to a new 40nm manufacturing process and the use of GDDR5, manages to bring impressive performance to the $99 price point. When you have a manufacturing process that is some 47% smaller and uses 16% fewer transistors, you end up with much smaller GPUs and less power consumption.

How much less? The short answer is, with this card AMD has made impressive strides to reduce power consumption. After the jump, a chart comparing the new card with the 9800GT, the GTS 250, and HD 4830.

Power utilization readings are taken both idle at the desktop and while running FurMark at a high resolution with AA enabled, which will work a 3D graphics card harder than almost any game. Cross notes that "impressively, the Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 card manages to draw very little power at idle, but nothing can quite catch up to the new Radeon HD 4770's full load power performance. It's ~30 watts less than the next nearest competitor, and that can make a real difference in some of the low-cost systems you'll find $100 graphics cards in."

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